The traditional “Notification LED” on an electronic device has lost its usefulness for users who often receive a constant stream of notifications. For such users, the notification LED blinks often and thus becomes “noise” that provides little in the way of useful information and, indeed, an always-blinking LED drowns out important notifications. Additionally, devices employing such notification LEDs foster an operational paradigm of “fidgeting” in which the user must constantly wake the device simply to view each notification. Such operation is both time consuming and cognitively draining. In view of such concerns, and others, it would be advantageous if one or more improved methods of providing notifications to users of electronic devices, and improved electronic devices configured to perform such methods, could be developed.
Interaction with the notification LED is typically performed through manual manipulation of a touch screen display or other input device. While voice recognition applications or modules are also available for user interaction, application processors are needed to execute the voice recognition applications while the electronic device is in an active or awake mode of operation. The awake mode of operation consumes more battery power which may quickly deplete the battery of an electronic device. Additionally, the user must interact with the electronic device to execute voice recognition software on the application processors for the electronic device to be able to detect keywords spoken by the user of the electronic device.